In her section on ‘Nationalist and Feminist Discourses on Jianmei (Robust Beauty) throughout China’s “National Crisis” in the 1930s’, Gao values the Shanghai every week women’s periodical Linglong as ‘a multi-vocal space for women’ (p. 109) to interrogate moving connotations of the notion of ‘robust beauty’ in relative to a varied feminine readership’s inquiries, answers and facts on present fads and fashion. Coming from distinct components of built-up humanity, these readers simultaneously with writers and reviewers offered a flawless computer display for philosophical discourses, informative missionizing and polemical propaganda that turned in specific Europe and the USA into both reflector and catalyst for new main headings at home. A complicated textual investigation (an investigation of a nation’s inscriptions on the feminine body) delicacies of moving localized notions of feminisms, stereotyping (with ‘an intriguing rotate of racial dynamics’, p. 115) of ‘Western’ and ‘Chinese’ feminine attractiveness, of an appearing heritage of personal fitness joined to the ‘fitness’ of the territory and of interior dissension over localized emulations of alien ideals that sat uneasily with personal, heritage and communal truths in which the readers of Linglong discovered themselves.
Jin Yihong’s study, deserving ‘Rethinking the “Iron Girls”: Gender and Labour throughout the Chinese Cultural Revolution’, extends with inquiries over the state’s mobilization of women employees, its significances for a gendered partition of work as well as for gender relatives and, more exactly, for women themselves. Symbolic of the liberation discourse throughout the Cultural Revolution, the function forms renowned as Iron Girls came to exemplify the influential Maoist decree that ‘men and women are the same’. Indeed, its leverage comes to into Chinese Communist Party rhetoric forming present gender politics. The Iron Girls, as Jin’s study illustrates, became a helpful, ideologically productive propaganda device for the Party to determination stress over work deployment but furthermore assisted other reasons, expanding command by the work unit over women and family. The force to outdo each other made these Iron Girls groups highly comparable, requiring although of their constituents tremendous pain and sacrifice.
